The
only drawback to complete enjoyment of this dish is that the
grasping and avaricious German restaurant keeper has the confounded
nerve to charge you, in our money, forty cents for awhole pheasant
and half a peck of cabbage - say, enough to furnish a full meal
for two tolerably hungry adults and a growing child.
The Germans like to eat and they love a hearty eater. There should
never be any trouble about getting a suitable person to serve us
at the Kaiser's court if the Administration at Washington will but
harken to the voice of experience. To the Germans the late Doctor
Tanner would have been a distinct disappointment in an ambassadorial
capacity; but there was a man who used to live in my congressional
district who could qualify in a holy minute if he were still alive.
He was one of Nature's noblemen, untutored but naturally gifted,
and his name was John Wesley Bass. He was the champion eater of
the world, specializing particularly in eggs on the shell, and
cove oysters out of the can, with pepper sauce on them, and soda
crackers on the side.
I regret to be compelled to state, however, that John Wesley is
no more. At one of our McCracken County annual fairs, a few years
back, he succumbed to overambition coupled with a mistake in
judgment. After he had established a new world's record by eating
at one sitting five dozen raw eggs he rashly rode on the steam
merry-go-round. At the end of the first quarter of an hour he
fainted and fell off a spotted wooden horse and never spoke again,
but passed away soon after being removed to his home in an unconscious
condition. I have forgotten what the verdict of the coroner's
jury was - the attending physician gave it some fancy Latin name - but
among laymen the general judgment was that our fellow townsman had
just naturally been scrambled to death. It was a pity, too - the
German people would have cared for John Wesley as an ambassador.
He would have eaten his way right into their affections.
We have the word of history for it that Vienna was originally
settled by the Celts, but you would hardly notice it now. On first
impressions you would say that about Vienna there was a noticeable
suggestion - a perceptible trace - of the Teutonic; and this applies
to the Austrian food in the main. I remember a kind of Wiener-schnitzel,
breaded, that I had in Vienna; in fact for the moment I do not
seem to recall much else about Vienna. Life there was just one
Wiener-schnitzel after another.
In order to spread sweetness and light, and to the end, furthermore,
that the ignorant people across the salted seas might know something
of a land of real food and much food, and plenty of it and plenty
of variety to it, I would that I might bring an expedition of
Europeans to America and personally conduct it up and down our
continent and back and forth crosswise of it.
And if I had the money of a Carnegie or a Rockefeller I would do
it, too, for it would be a greater act of charity than building
public libraries or endowing public baths. I would include in my
party a few delegates from England, where every day is All Soles'
Day; and a few sausage-surfeited Teutons; and some Gauls, wearied
and worn by the deadly poulet routine of their daily life, and a
scattering representation from all the other countries over there.
In especial I would direct the Englishman's attention to the broiled
pompano of New Orleans; the kingfish filet of New York; the sanddab
of Los Angeles; the Boston scrod of the Massachusetts coast; and
that noblest of all pan fish - the fried crappie of Southern Indiana.
To these and to many another delectable fishling, would I introduce
the poor fellow; and to him and his fellows I fain would offer a
dozen apiece of Smith Island oysters on the half shell.
And I would take all of them to New England for baked beans and
brown bread and codfish balls; but on the way we would visit the
shores of Long Island for a kind of soft clam which first is steamed
and then is esteemed. At Portsmouth, New Hampshire, they should
each have a broiled lobster measuring thirty inches from tip to
tip, fresh caught out of the Piscataqua River.
Vermont should come to them in hospitality and in pity, offering
buckwheat cakes and maple sirup. But Rhode Island would bring a
genuine Yankee blueberry pie and directions for the proper consumption
of it, namely - discarding knife and fork, to raise a crusty,
dripping wedge of blueberry pie in your hand to your mouth, and
to take a first bite, which instantly changes the ground-floor
plan of that pie from a triangle to a crescent; and then to take
a second bite, and then to lick your fingers - and then there isn't
any more pie.
Down in Kentucky I should engage Mandy Berry, colored, to fry for
them some spring chickens and make for them a few pones of real
cornbread. In Creole Louisiana they should sample crawfish gumbo;
and in Georgia they should have 'possum baked with sweet potatoes;
and in Tidewater Maryland, terrapin and canvasback; and in Illinois,
young gray squirrels on toast; and in South Carolina, boiled rice
with black-eyed peas; and in Colorado, cantaloupes; and in Kansas,
young sweet corn; and in Virginia, country hams, not cured with
chemicals but with hickory smoke and loving hands; and in Tennessee,
jowl and greens.
And elsewhere they should have their whacking fill of prairie hen
and suckling pig and barbecued shote, and sure-enough beefsteak,
and goobers hot from the parching box; and scrapple, and yams
roasted in hot wood-ashes; and hotbiscuit and waffles and Parker
house rolls - and the thousand and one other good things that may
be found in this our country, and which are distinctively and
uniquely of this country.
